Category: General

An adults-only chess tournament was held in Columbus, Ohio, last month. Such events are few and far between, so my friend John and I decided to go. It was certainly a lot closer to where we live, in Michigan, than is the Charlotte Chess Center, where we attended a tournament last November.

Studying the list of twenty entrants beforehand, I saw that I was once again at the bottom, and the next strongest player, was rated considerably above me. Not only that, during casual between-rounds conversation, someone from his chess club pronounced him underrated. I had hoped that I might gain my first tournament win this time around, but I knew it would be a long shot, and sure enough I am still without a tournament win. But the three-game day was a very nice experience, and I was able to enjoy it more than I had my previous two tournaments. One reason, I think, is that I now felt very comfortable writing down my moves and hitting the clock. Moreover, the event was held in a public library meeting room, with a Sweetwaters coffee shop just a few yards away, so there was no worry about going hungry or having insufficient caffeine. Also, perhaps because of the small number of participants, people were very friendly, and I was able to have nice conversations with several of them between rounds. One was David Marks, who gave John and me helpful information about how we might start a club and host a tournament. Coincidentally, David was interviewed by Kevin Scull on the Chess Journeys podcast shortly after the tournament. 

Based on the list of entrants and the tournament’s small size, I had a feeling that I would be the only woman present. At my first tournament, which had included many children, I felt very self-conscious about my gender, my age, and my chess ability. Would the kids who played me think I looked like their crazy grandmother? At my second, adults-only tournament, I  wasn’t distracted by such thoughts. I just wanted to count how many women there were. I wasn’t able to get a precise number, but it appeared to be between 10 and 15 percent. 

In Columbus, I had a new feeling–that I was proud to be the only woman playing chess there, which felt almost as good as a win. The organizer, Jeff Shen, told me that he is working to bring more girls and women into the game. According to Jennifer Shahade’s essential book Chess Queens, between 2010 and 2020, female participation in US chess was between 11 and 14 percent, an increase over the 8 percent logged in 2000. In the best case scenario, there would have been one additional woman at the Columbus tournament. I do wish I could have scored at least one win, to demonstrate that women can not only play chess, but play well. Fortunately, my opponents and my teacher, reviewing the games, told me that I had played competitively. I am glad I was there and that I can now sit down at the board with a tournament opponent and attend to the business at hand without as much mental baggage about my gender as I had at first. Presumably my chess will improve with those extra brain cells at work. 

[An Older Woman’s Chess Journey  is a proud affiliate of ChessGoals–if you use the link here to purchase from them and enter “dawn” as the coupon code, you will receive 30% off their courses, and I will receive a commission. Purchasing via an affiliate link doesn’t cost you any extra, and I only recommend products and services I trust.]

In his aptly titled book Perpetual Chess Improvement, Ben Johnson designated “community” as the fourth pillar of chess improvement (the first three being playing serious games, analyzing your games, and practicing tactics). But it can be difficult to find or build that needed chess community. It is easy to find strangers with whom to play online, and there are plenty of coaches who will work with you virtually. But those one-on-one interactions don’t constitute community.

In retrospect, I think that I was seeking community, in a sense, when I started this blog. I had many things to say about my chess journey and many questions to ask, but no place to direct them. 

I was thrilled when I learned that there was a chess club meeting weekly in the town right next to mine. My community! But did I rush out to join at the first opportunity? No, I chose instead to torment myself with anxieties about it. What if I’m the poorest player there? I had no shortage of other excuses: it’s in the evening, whereas I’m a lark who is starting to wind down when the club is ramping up. No one will want to play with me, and those who do will try Scholar’s Mate and other traps, checkmating me in under ten moves. 

[Scroll down to the end of the post for a link to ChessGoals and a coupon code for 30% off their courses.]

At the same time that I was contemplating attending the chess club, people were encouraging me to go to a tournament. Actually I have wanted to sample the atmosphere of a large chess gathering like that ever since my first viewing of The Queen’s Gambit, but until today all I had done was look through the multitude of tournament announcements and come up with reasons why each tournament isn’t right for me. The time control is too short, the venue is inconvenient, it’s on a holiday weekend when roads will be crowded, etc, etc. 

Eventually, two things galvanized me into getting out to the chess club. One was the realization that, if I was being this hesitant about going to a casual club meeting, I would never get myself to a tournament. The other was that I have had a dream of starting a chess club for girls and women in my town, and it was time to realize it. It would make sense to do some networking at the other club first. So I went! The networking was successful–having met the club leader that evening, it was easy to email him afterward and ask if I could publicize my women’s group on his club’s Facebook page. And even though I was anxious and overwhelmed that first night, I felt at home amid all the chess talk. Many members were full of tales of their recent trip to the Chicago Open and the cheater who had been caught there. 

My second trip to the club was even better than the first, not least because the ice had been broken. I had heard that it would be a real joy (not to mention instructive) to play over the board and do an in-person post-mortem of the game with your opponent, and it was great to finally experience that. In the meantime, I had held the first meeting of my women and girls group, in a room reserved at the local public library. We had five at our first meeting, including a seven-year-old girl and her mother. It was marvelous to think that I might be helping to convey the joy of chess to a young girl. 

These first small steps toward building community around my chess somehow gave me the push I needed to register for a tournament, finally. I will be attending the Chicago Class Open later this month. Expect a debrief in my next post 🙂

An Older Woman’s Chess Journey  is a proud affiliate of ChessGoals–if you use the link here to purchase from them and enter “dawn” as the coupon code, you will receive 30% off their courses, and I will receive a commission. Purchasing via an affiliate link doesn’t cost you any extra, and I only recommend products and services I trust.

 

 

I had the great good fortune of being interviewed by Kevin Scull recently on his podcast, Chess Journeys. I actually tried to refuse him at first by saying that my rating was too low to make me a worthy guest, but fortunately he felt otherwise. We had a delightful conversation. I had assumed we would because I knew from listening to him that Keven asks interesting and sometimes quirky follow-up questions and injects a lot of himself into the conversation. Beyond recording the episode, I have experienced a lot of pleasure from the reactions that friends and other adult improvers have communicated to me. I am especially grateful to the friends who don’t know anything about chess and listened to the entire hour anyway! I have also garnered a number of new subscribers to this blog as a result. What a great experience! 

Recording the podcast also had another great consequence that I would never have anticipated. It made me feel like a legitimate member of the chess community. I have let my low rating and slow climb make me feel like I don’t belong with the other adult improvers on chess Twitter. In general, people with ratings lower than say, 800 or 1000, don’t show up online or on podcasts. I hadn’t given this much thought–if any–until someone who emailed in response to my blog pointed out that people at my level don’t usually put themselves out there as I was. That gave me pause, and when I reread my blog recently and saw that I had included a screenshot from chess.com showing my (at the time) all-time-high rating of 539 I did feel a bit embarrassed. But that was not so much because I had put that out there, but because of how incredibly high that number felt to me at the time. Now that I’ve been playing longer, I’ve observed that a new high rating–especially one you have been longing for for some time–sounds the highest before you attain it and a few minutes afterward. Then it very quickly loses its luster. It’s sad, really. Psychologists have various terms for this, such as the “arrival fallacy” or “hedonic adaptation.” An example of the latter that is often given is a person who wins a large amount of money in the lottery and is initially happier but eventually falls back into their former level of happiness or unhappiness.

I’m not sure why being on the podcast made me feel more “legitimate,” or even what I mean by that. But somehow it made me feel that there is not as much difference among us adult improvers as I had thought our rating numbers indicated. We all started from the same place and are generally interested in hearing about others’ chess beginnings. We all care about our rating, albeit to different degrees. And we all keep playing even after we have realized that our progress is never quite enough to satisfy us. The title of Kevin’s podcast and of this blog both include the word “journey.” Remember that kind of sappy saying, “Life is a journey, not a destination”? Well, it’s true about chess, too. 

 

After hiring Ono as my chess coach, I decided to read some of his early blog entries so that I could learn what his journey had been like at the beginning. I started with the post entitled “My First Months in Chess: The Adult Beginner Diary.” In it, he mentions an episode of the Perpetual Chess podcast that featured Dr. Jana Krivec, and how it had helped his chess mindset. Knowing that my own chess mindset needs a lot of work, I checked out Dr. Krivec’s conversation with Ben Johnson right away. I was so affected by it that I went on to read the book that was the occasion for her appearance, Improve Your Life by Playing a Game (2021). The book is an absolute gold mine of information about the relationship between our thinking and our chess performance. It also includes many inspirational quotations and one-minute exercises that illustrate her points, as well as a sprinkling of chess puzzles that she also ties into the discussion. 

How is she able to do all of this? Well, Dr. Krivec is both a seven-time winner of the Slovenian Women’s Championship and a professor of psychology in Slovenia. She deftly combines these two areas of expertise in Improve Your Life by Playing a Game, condensing the underlying psychological research in a readily understandable way and supplementing it with useful illustrations.

The structure of the book is chess-player-friendly, beginning with training and then covering all aspects of tournament participation, from preparation to during and after the game as well as after the tournament. Even if a chess tournament is not in your immediate plans, everything in that section applies equally well to chess in your living room or at the local club, be it virtual or IRL. The final section of the book discusses chess education and documents the ways chess can benefit our health.

Although a great strength of the book is the wide variety of evidence-based advice it contains, the parts of the book that helped my game immediately were in the subsections “During a Chess Game” and “Coping with Stress and Losses.” The latter section discusses how to recognize and correct cognitive distortions. Ono had gotten me started on this road by suggesting that my game analyses include an account of how I was feeling during key moments. Until I did so, I hadn’t realized the extent to which negative thoughts were plaguing me the minute I sat down at the (virtual) board. I observed that even before the first move, I had always already decided that the other player was better than I was. My rating is still quite low, but I have the app set to match me with people within 100 points in either direction, so they can’t all be better, right? I was also burdening myself with the paradoxical belief that whether they started out by attempting a trick like Wayward Queen or by playing a traditional opening, both showed that they had more chess knowledge than I did. Writing about it now, it is easy for me to see how silly and illogical all of this is, but one insidious aspect of negative thoughts is that they can operate just below the surface, where you can’t talk back to them because you don’t know they are there. 

As someone who has sat through more than one course of cognitive behavioral therapy, I know how uncomfortable or even silly it can feel to articulate those negative thoughts. Take, for example, one of my most blatant cognitive distortions. In one game, the opponent lined up his two bishops on adjacent squares, and I panicked. My thought was, “I’ve heard of something called checkmate with two bishops, and that’s going to happen. I’m done for.” Reviewing the game while recollecting this thought showed me that the bishops were far away from my king, with many pieces in between! 

Before I read this book, I had learned the chess mantra, “You either win or learn something.” I’ve now modified this to, “Every day I’m learning something more about chess and myself.”

I have just two minor quibbles with this book. One, there is no electronic edition. When I was only able to find print copies of Krivec’s book, I reached out to the author to ask whether an electronic edition might become available. Happily, she responded that her publishers had said that they expect to issue one in July of this year. Two, I worry that the lack of the word chess in its title and subtitle (Improve Your Life by Playing a Game–Learn How to Turn Your Life Activities into Lifelong Skills) limits the book’s reach. I am sympathetic to the idea that the many tips and thinking techniques assembled could be applied to other games. But in the final analysis, the book is very chess-centric. I hope that Ben’s podcast, Ono’s blog post, and this piece will help it reach the audience it deserves.

 

The end of 2022 coincided roughly with the end of my first full year of studying chess (although I lost a couple of months dealing with a knee that ultimately had to be replaced). Soon after I started playing, I set a ratings goal for myself of 600. It amuses me to think of this now, because when I set it I had no idea that there were many different ratings systems, which are not easily translatable to one another. I finished the year with a chess.com rapid rating of 556, and although I am as eager as always to go higher–especially to reach 660 so that I can climb out of the Chess Dojo Training basement–I am pretty satisfied with this for my first year mark. My satisfaction with it increased after I heard Daniel Lona talk with Amy Shaw about ratings on the Chess Experience podcast. They were saying that one number cannot possibly represent all the nuances of someone’s chess performance and suggested thinking of your rating as a range of minus or plus 50 from that number. Which conveniently makes my 2022 rating 506-606. Although I am now very aware of the vagaries of ratings and the pros and cons of using them as a measure of one’s chess, I am still going to set myself a ratings goal for 2023–800.

As with ratings, when I first started playing chess I don’t think I really understood anything about the various time controls. Basically I played whatever time was put before me, which usually happened to be 10 minutes or less (per side) because I was in group settings online designed for people to be able to play multiple games in a short time. It took surprisingly long for me to realize that I needed more time to think about my moves and that I might play much better given the opportunity to do so. Eventually I settled on a time control of 30 minutes per side when seeking playing partners online, and that has been a revelation. Not only has my chess been better, but the opponents with whom I am matched tend to be more serious players, that is, not all tricksters who lead with a “wayward queen attack.” Presumably that goes hand in hand with the fact that a 30 minute time control means that the game can go as long as 60 minutes. Even with 30 minutes, I am losing on time sometimes, but as a relative beginner I don’t think I need to worry about that too much. I assume that more proficiency will bring about some gains in speed.

For a number of months after I started playing, when I didn’t have a friend to play with in person or online, I played against the chess bots of lichess.org and chess.com. This felt easy and safe, I guess because no one was watching (chess.com does not even store those games in your record, although lichess.does). I can’t remember why, but one day I realized that my chess would probably improve more if I played real people instead. It may sound strange, but this takes a bit of courage. Even if you will never meet this person in the flesh and likely never encounter them again online, they are a real person, which triggers a deeper level of accountability than does a bot. I also discovered that playing people around my rating level was the most rewarding for me. Too much lower, and it is not challenging enough; too much higher, and you are so busy defending/being intimidated/dreading the loss that you can’t enjoy or learn from the superior player.

The lessons discussed above can be put more succinctly as: Play real people, around your rating, at a time control that suits your chess ability. In earlier blog posts I also recommend getting a coach and analyzing your games. I plan to keep all of these things in mind in 2023 as I continue to savor this incredibly interesting and amazingly difficult pastime. 

 

I have other hobbies besides chess, including playing an online Scrabble-like game called Lexulous. Lexulous gives players ratings in a manner adopted from chess, and as in chess, when two people play, there is a winner and a loser. But I have yet to see someone proclaim in a Tweet: “I’m quitting Lexulous.” 

In the chess Twitterverse, however, it is not unusual to see posts in which discouraged players declare that they are leaving the game. There are various flavors of this. The former world chess champion Magnus Carlsen has not quit playing, although he did step down from being world champion. As people have asked, “Who does this in any other sport?” No one. Levy Rozman, known widely for his chess YouTube channel GothamChess, recently declared that he was quitting playing in chess tournaments. Interestingly, he still plays chess online and exults in the high rating he is achieving without putting tournament-level pressure on himself. 

Of course, if I were to quit chess, it would not be newsworthy. I would just be another person whom the black and white armies had driven to a place of silent desperation. But I would not be alone. I saw the following question in an online chess forum: “Should I quit chess because it makes me depressed?” Another forum post says, “I get very nervous when playing, I feel as if my whole life is on the line with each move and that each loss is another failure.’”

Unfortunately, I can relate to these feelings, and I imagine that many other chess players–especially beginners–can relate to them as well. What to do? I don’t want to quit chess because it makes me depressed. I want to quit getting depressed about my chess. I want to rid myself of the feeling that “my whole life is on the line with each move and that each loss is another failure.” But sometimes I get to feeling badly enough about my game that I avoid playing, unless it is with a very trusted friend or in what I have found is a safe environment (and even there, the negative feelings can still arise). Playing less chess does not usually help one’s game, however, especially if one is an inexperienced player. Nor does playing less inure one to losing, in my experience.

Listening to chess podcasts and reading chess tweets has given me some comfort, however. I used to think that the people who played chess, especially those with online personas, must be a thick-skinned bunch who did not suffer nearly as much as I did from losing. But two prominent podcasters–Daniel Lona of the Chess Experience and Kevin Scull of Chess Journeys–are quite open about their chess frustrations on their shows and on Twitter. As reassuring as it has been to see that they suffer, too, I am sorry to learn that even if I become much better at chess, as they are, my despair may still be with me. But I will persist. Which means that I will also probably continue to ponder this issue here. 

Recommendation: I already couldn’t see out how Ben Johnson managed to do all the things he was doing (most notably, the Perpetual Chess family of podcasts), and now he has added something new: the Perpetual Chess Link-Fest, a blog/newsletter in which he compiles links to good online chess content. This week’s edition happens to include links to a couple of blog posts about chess improvement.